Franzi Groszmann, Saved Child From Nazis

October 3, 2005|By Douglas Martin The New York Times

Franzi Groszmann, who was thought to be among the last survivors of the parents who put their London-bound children on trains to escape Nazi persecution, in the famed Kindertransport, or children's transport, died on Sept. 20 in Manhattan. She was 100.

Deborah Oppenheimer, producer of the 2000 movie Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, announced the death.

Oppenheimer, whose mother was a Kindertransport child, said she believed that Mrs. Groszmann was the last surviving mother who had placed a child (the author Lore Segal) on a train from Germany, Austria or Czechoslovakia to seek safety in Britain.

The British government had eased immigration restrictions for children younger than 17 after the violent attack on Jews in Germany in November 1938 known as Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass.

"In no time, the suitcase was gone, the child was gone, the other children were gone -- just emptiness," Mrs. Groszmann said in the film about watching Lore board the train in Vienna. "I did not talk. It was awful."

She relaxed only after she received a postcard from Lore in England saying she was safe.

Segal told about the Kindertransport in her autobiographical novel, Other People's Houses, drawing a loving portrait of a charming and capable mother. From Dec. 2, 1938, until May 14, 1940, 9,000 to 10,000 children, 7,500 of them Jewish, were sent to Britain.

The mother and daughter also appeared in Melissa Hacker's Academy Award-winning 1996 film My Knees Were Jumping.

Mrs. Groszmann's husband and Lore's father was Ignatz, the chief accountant of a Vienna bank, who was fired after Hitler took over Austria. At that time Lore was their only child.

In later years, when Lore thought of boarding the train, she had "no clear recollection" of her father's being there. She wrote, "Every time I looked toward them it was my mother's tiny face ... that I saw smiling steadily toward me."

In England, Lore met the first of five foster families; with none of them would she feel comfortable. In an interview with The Jewish Week in 2001, she said her mother wrote her: "Be good. Be obedient. Be neat. Be tidy. Always be nice."

On the instructions her father gave her before leaving, Lore wrote the Jewish refugee committee asking it to get her parents out of Austria, as well as her grandparents, aunt and twin cousins. Her request was granted, and her parents and the others emigrated to England.

But they found work as domestic servants and could not have children living with them. She did not live with her relatives again until after the war, when she joined them in the Dominican Republic at the age of 21.

Segal and her mother and grandmother immigrated to New York from the Dominican Republic in 1951 and lived together in a small apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Mrs. Groszmann worked as a salad cook at Schrafft's and as a sales clerk at a Washington Heights bakery. After helping Lore with her first baby, she trained herself to become a nurse.